Monday.....Miscellaneous.....Social Networking

Most people have heard of the social networking site Facebook. Tabletalk is a monthly devotional from R. C. Sproul's Ligonier Ministries (http://www.ligonier.org/) It contains a daily bible study each month, and also has a number of articles inside written on the topic of the month. For example, this month's topic is called A Brave New World and it revolves around cultural issues, one of which is Facebook. It's written by John R. Muether who is a professor at the Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. He identified a number of issues with Facebook that are similar to those that have been floating around in my mind and I would like to share them with you. The author writes that we have lost the art of deep and thoughtful reading. Among other things, he points to blogging as one of the culprits and I'm sure I have contributed to this. As for Facebook, he says it trivializes the notion of friendship and is eroding our sense of community. Friendship demands real contact he says and he uses his 400 friends on his own Facebook page as evidence for he had, a few times, made friends of people who he thought were someone else. I found the following statement profound, the paradox is that it links us to folks far away while it separates those from whom we are closest. According to Professor Meuther it has transformed friendship into a commodity where we collect friends in our desire to build status. The time we spend talking about ourselves, he laments, is time that we could be spending in thoughtful correspondence with genuine friends. In another thought provoking concept he likens Facebook with today's modern church whose craving for members mirrors the individual's tally for friends. The other day I was talking to a young man who, for whatever reason, has forsaken attending any church. His response to my request for an update on his condition was I feel that whenever two or three are gathered together, that that is church. As misguided as that is when put in the context he meant it, it might be more meaningful on relationships than Facebook's cyberspace friendships. The author quotes another author, Shane Hipps in, Digital social networking inoculates people against the desire to be physically present with others in real "social networks." The author continues virtual communities have the advantage of allowing one to leave as easily as one joined, just don't respond to an email! The article concluded with an encouragement in an age of short attention spans; to read the next article in Tabletalk since reading one article has already been completed, and also to write a letter to a friend, adding texting or blogging is cheating. He mentions the good that can come from Facebook and hopefully there is good in blogging also. My reasoning for this blog? We are literally on the brink of seeing the end of the American Experiment as it has been called. Internationalists have, for quite some time, wanted America to follow in lock-step, the Socialist agenda they pursue. They have known that the American people are the cog in the works...too religious...too traditional....too....American. They have the administration in place they have wanted and it was their pressuring of this administration to get tough that partially precipitated the attack on our republic that we experienced over the weekend. As for the church, it is thoroughly modern. By and large, it is therapeutic. When it isn't, it enters politics for the wrong reason seeking the mind of the Founding Fathers. I have tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to present a strong opinion of love for this country, but that love based only on God's blessing of others by having mercy on us and being long suffering towards us. Indeed, it is a line that is easy to cross over but the pilgrim's path must be travelled even though their are dangers to the left and to the right.